In this episode of Random Nature, host Christy Hyman welcomes writer and scholar Maia Butler to trace the landscapes that shaped her life and her work. Maia opens by locating her roots on Coast Salish land in Olympia, Washington, before moving through her childhood in south- central Alaska on Denaʼina Athabascan lands. She describes early memories of Homer on the Aleutian Chain; making mud pies, digging and cooking clams on the beach, and falling asleep under the midnight sun.
As Maia grew, so did her “landscape literacy”: learning subsistence fishing and hunting, foraging for medicinal plants with her mother as her first teacher, and braving long winters of snow and ice. She vividly recalls volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and avalanches—moments when Alaska’s raw power humbled her family and forged in her a lifelong sense that “worlds are ending and new ones are beginning” at every turn.
Later, Maia moved south for graduate school, planting new roots in coastal North Carolina on Lumbee, Coharie, Waccamaw Siouan, and Eastern Band Cherokee lands and before that, in Louisiana’s bayous and wetlands. There, the rhythms of hurricanes and floods echoed Alaska’s natural drama, teaching her once again to respect forces beyond human control.
Christy shares her own Alaskan stories from Nome—bathtub races at dawn, ten-year-olds driving trucks, and weeks under endless daylight and finding in Maia’s memories a shared awe for remote places where nature is always in charge. Tune in to hear how these experiences inform Maia’s writing, her sense of localness, and her belief that every storm, eruption, or blackout is both an ending and a beginning.
Links to Dr. Maia Butler’s projects:
https://maialbutler.substack.com/p/the-novels-of-toni-morrison-resources-73a/comments
https://centerforfiction.org/group-workshop/a-year-of-toni-morrison-volume-ii-with-maia-butler-additional-session
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bell-hookss-radical-pedagogy-9781350441590
https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/N/Narrating-History-Home-and-Dyaspora
Also look for the forthcoming collection Black Women’s Gardens as Art and Practice (Harvard 2027)
Topics/People/Events Covered:
Wilmington Race Massacre of 1898: In November 1898, white supremacist militias in Wilmington, North Carolina staged a violent overthrow of the city's legitimately elected government—one of the few successful coups in U.S. history. The mob burned down the offices of a Black-owned newspaper, killed an unknown number of Black residents, and expelled Black and white Republican leaders from the city. The event effectively ended Reconstruction-era Black political power in North Carolina and has been largely omitted from mainstream historical memory.
Alexander Manly: Black(very, very lightskinned could actually have passed for white) journalist and publisher of the Wilmington Daily Record, the only Black daily newspaper in the country at the time. His 1898 editorial challenging the racist myth of the Black male predator was used as a pretext for the massacre. Manly's voice and its violent silencing represent the stakes of Black intellectual life in the post-Reconstruction South.
https://goinnorth.org/exhibits/show/milo-manly/manly-family
Camille Dungy:Poet, essayist, and editor whose work reclaims the natural world as a site of Black experience and expression. Her edited volume Black Nature recovered a tradition of African American nature poetry that mainstream literary culture had long ignored. Maia mentions Dungy’s work Soil in the podcast.
Jesmyn Ward: Mississippi-born novelist and two-time National Book Award winner. Her fiction renders Black Southern communities with unflinching intimacy, returning repeatedly to water—flood, gulf, storm surge—as both literal threat and spiritual presence.
bell hooks: Prolific Black feminist thinker whose scholarship and cultural criticism examined the intersections of race, gender, and class while insisting on love as a radical political practice.
Critical Fabulation: A term coined by scholar Saidiya Hartman describing the practice of filling archival silences through rigorous, imaginative speculation giving narrative form to lives that history has rendered nameless or voiceless, while remaining transparent about the act of doing so.
